“Matter in the Hands of the Maker”: The Racialization of Mizrahi Labor in Zionist Culture

Abstract As Zionist cultural production reveals, class formation in Palestine/Israel is bound to a racialized perception of Arabs as “natural workers”—hardworking yet unskilled, humble yet unruly. Besides Palestinians, this framework extends to Mizrahi Jews, rendering the two groups uncomfortably akin and structurally antagonistic. Analyzing texts produced at key moments in Zionist history, this article relates changes in representations of Mizrahi workers to shifts in political economy. In Haim Hazaz’s 1933 story “Rahamim,” written as Zionism was establishing a tiered labor market, a vigorous, simple-minded Mizrahi worker redeems his ideological yet unproductive Ashkenazi counterpart. In Hillel Mittelpunkt’s 1986 rock opera Mami, reflecting the post-1967 surge in exploitation of Palestinian labor as Zionism increasingly mobilized Mizrahi support, the small-town heroine remains content despite her subjection to feminized service work until an Ashkenazi scientist transforms her into a war-mongering politician. In the contemporary television series Fauda, the state delegates counterinsurgency work to Mizrahi career soldiers, mobilizing their affinity to Arabs to execute its violence against Palestinians, now depicted as an enemy of equal stature whose defeat is necessary for stabilizing the racialized political economy. Across these historical variations, the “naturalness” trope remains central, facilitating the co-constitutive yet differential racialization of Mizrahim and Palestinians.